Lots of broken-up bands reconvene for a tour, as the Black Crowes did in 2019, half a decade after brothers Chris and Rich Robinson dissolved the Southern rock group they’d formed in Atlanta in the mid-1980s. Some even stay together long enough to make a new record, as the Crowes managed to do with 2024’s well-received “Happiness Bastards.” What’s relatively rare in music is for a reunited band to quickly follow up a comeback album with a second one. Yet that’s what the Robinsons did this year when they dropped “A Pound of Feathers,” the Crowes’ 10th studio LP, behind which they’ll touch down Monday night at the Hollywood Bowl. Ahead of the show, Chris Robinson, 59, called from the road to tell the stories behind five of the band’s songs.
‘Hard to Handle’ (1990)
The Black Crowes broke out with a frisky cover of this Otis Redding tune just as hair metal was giving way to grunge. A hit on MTV, the song drove sales of the band’s debut, “Shake Your Money Maker,” to sales of more than 5 million copies.
There are some songs of Otis’ that I couldn’t do justice. As a 21-year-old kid starting my career — well, we didn’t even know we were gonna have careers — but what am I gonna sing? “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”? “Hard to Handle,” it’s cheeky, it’s lighthearted. And I loved the break: “Pretty little thing, let me light your candle…” So I took it to George Drakoulias, our producer, and I said, “I think we could do this.” George is the one who turned it into “Walk This Way” — he put it in the same rhythmic space. Otis’ version swings, but we really couldn’t swing at the time.
So “Hard to Handle” wasn’t something you were playing live early on?
No, we brought it in for the record. Being from Georgia and Otis being from Georgia, it was important to us that people knew this is where we’re coming from. Two autumns ago, Zelma Redding and her family invited us to their big old ranch outside Macon, and we had an afternoon in the great man’s study. They have all his awards and guitars and stuff and the velvet slippers he had on when the plane crashed. At certain times in our career, we’ve been like, “F—, do we have to play ‘Hard to Handle’ again?’” We’d jam at the end or try all these things to make it sound different. But as the years have gone by, we just play it the way it’s supposed to be.
George’s engineer, Brendan O’Brien, played the guitar solo in “Hard to Handle.” Why?
We had Jeff Cease, but he’d split and gone back to Nashville. And Rich didn’t play solos back then. That changed, but at the time he was the rhythm guitar player. So it was out of necessity. We needed that meat-and-potatoes solo, and Brendan could rip it. I saw him on some podcast saying we were in L.A. and we were gonna call Slash. I’m like, “No we weren’t — you did the solo in Atlanta on Rich’s Les Paul.”
“Shake Your Money Maker” came out on Rick Rubin’s Def American label, and he’s credited as executive producer. Did Rick do anything on the album?
No.
All righty.
I’m just being honest. George and I lived in Rick’s house — I was in the basement — but the most I saw of him at the time was him leaving to go get lunch at Canter’s with Glenn Danzig. He did come to a session once with Andrew Dice Clay. We were called Mr. Crowe’s Garden at the time — we weren’t yet the Black Crowes. Rick and George were like, “You guys probably need to change your name,” and Andrew Dice Clay goes, “You should change it to Sticky Paste.” I said, “Why don’t you stick to the cigarette over your head, and I’ll handle this?”
‘She Talks to Angels’ (1990)
For “Money Maker’s” fourth single, the band released this darkly poetic ballad about a woman struggling with a drug addiction.
Were you nervous to reveal a softer side?
The only trepidation would’ve been because this was the power-ballad era of all the hair-metal bands.
Poison with “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and so on.
Every band had one. There were hair-metal bands that only had power ballads — Firehouse or some band with 17th century French aristocrat hair.
Everything but the lace cravat.
Everything but sincere songwriting. Look, they’re people too — I get it. But we wrote a ballad out of the sincerity of how we were feeling, you know? We were reaching for “Wild Horses” or “Dark End of the Street” or “Astral Weeks.” The power ballad was a device for rock bands, but we didn’t use it as that. We used it as pure expression.
Tell me about the story the song tells.
My interest in writing and literature revolved around darker themes, whether it was the Beats or Paul Bowles or whatever. There’s drugs and madness and pain but also glory and redemption and the true heartbeat of life. So the song is a sad story but it’s romantic. There’s no moral gotcha — no resentment toward the character or the predicament they find themselves in.
How’d you come by that approach?
Reading. My mother, who just passed away a few weeks ago, she gave me a great gift: I’m dyslexic, and my mom in the early ’70s in the Deep South, she knew something was up with me. I went to school three times a week after school for years to learn how to read. And when that clicked, that was everything. My life now, it’s horribly boring. Rick Rubin with Danzig at Canter’s sounds exciting compared to Chris Robinson and the used bookstores of my life.
“Angels” is full of vivid details: the lock of hair in the woman’s pocket, for instance. Who were the songwriters that taught you how to create an image?
It all starts with Bob: “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule” — like, what?! But I’m a funny Dylan fan because I like the weird lyrics he does, like “Clothes Line Saga” from “The Basement Tapes.” Alex Chilton was really big. The first Big Star record I could get my hands on in the early ’80s was “3rd.” As a matter of fact, the first show we ever did, Rich and I played “Nightime” from that record.
On the strength of “Money Maker,” the Crowes were nominated for best new artist at the Grammys in 1991. You didn’t win —
A theme that continues today.
You remember who did?
It was Mariah Carey, I think.
Correct.
Good for her. Rich and I flew in from some tour date for one night, and I remember MC Hammer winning and doing something with Pepsi. I met MC Hammer a couple years ago. Amazingly cool guy.
What put you and Hammer in the same room?
I’m not allowed to talk about that.
Sure.
No, I’m serious — I can’t talk about it.
‘Remedy’ (1992)
The Crowes’ sophomore album, “The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion,” was led by this swaggering soul-rock jam, which Robinson opened with a memorable couplet: “Baby, baby, why can’t you sit still? / Who killed that bird out on your windowsill?”
I was in Philly a few weeks ago, in Rittenhouse Square, and I said to my friend, “That’s the hotel that I opened my window one gray day on tour, and there was a dead bird.” The room was on the 15th floor or something, and I guess the bird had flown into the glass. I was in a series of early failed rock and roll relationships, so my imagination was: Who killed that bird? Oh, she did it. The rest of it’s made up, but I had to see the dead bird that morning to kick off the thought.
There’s some great interplay here between you and your background singers — really draws out the R&B in the band’s sound.
For us, it’s instinctive. I’ve ingested a lot of Funkadelic, a lot of Prince, a lot of the Gap Band. One of my first concerts was Cameo on the “Alligator Woman” tour — mind-blowing. My singing is far more rhythmic than it is melodic a lot of the time. When I was playing with Joe Perry last summer, Steven Tyler came down to the Hollywood Bowl to do “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” He was like, “What key’s it in?” I said, “I don’t know.” He’s like, “You’ve been out with Joe for three weeks, and you don’t know what key the song’s in?” I said, “Steven, are you ready? I’ve never known what key a song is in.”
“Remedy” spent 11 straight weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s rock radio chart. One of the songs stuck behind it was the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge.”
And just think — I never took my shirt off.
‘Sting Me’ (1992)
The tune that eventually knocked “Remedy” from the top spot? The Crowes’ second single from “Southern Harmony.”
It’s as close to a protest song as we ever got. Concerts in the ’90s were wild, man — we were seeing security guards beating on kids. But we were also seeing this blind patriotism toward ideals and philosophies that you’ve never even really looked at with any depth. So: “If you feel like a riot / Then don’t you deny it.”
There’s something slippery about the riff — it takes a second to figure out where the one is.
It fights itself — it’s funky in there. “Shake Your Money Maker” was very straight — click tracks to put the drum track together, now play the bass over that, blah blah blah. We just weren’t great at that point. By the time we’re in the studio with “Sting Me,” though, that’s one take live on the floor. We made “Southern Harmony” in eight days.
You can hear the effect of having played a few hundred gigs.
I’m glad you say that. Now bands are like, “I don’t want to go on the road — I’m gonna take a mental health break.” Can you imagine in 1992, you’re in one of the biggest bands in the world, and you’re like, “Hey man, I gotta chill out”? Get the f— out of here.
The “Sting Me” video was filmed at the Great Atlanta Pot Festival in 1992, which the band played as part of your activism around legalizing weed. What’s it been like to see those efforts succeed to some degree?
My main victory within that, if my voice was a part of it, is that we’re in a more gentle place — that it won’t ruin your life now if the police pull you over and there’s a roach in your ashtray. You have to realize: Being arrested isn’t just about the inconvenience of being incarcerated — it’s that now you’re in the system. I mean, ask any marginalized community — those drug laws were put on the books to keep you down.
‘Pharmacy Chronicles’ (2026)
Over a shuffling country-blues groove, Robinson sings about “perfume, Champagne and sin” in this standout from “A Pound of Feathers.”
Would you have foreseen that, after you got back together, you and Rich would release two albums in less than two years?
I don’t know about that. But leave Rich and I to our own devices, and that’s what we do. Our whole entrée into this world wasn’t because I could sing or he was a great guitarist — we wanted to write songs. I’ve written a lot of songs by myself, and probably out of those songs, there’s a few that I’m proud of. And I think Rich would say the same thing for himself. But there’s just something about the inspiration I get from Rich’s playing that makes us a successful songwriting team.
“Pharmacy Chronicles” has some bedraggled wisdom to it. I’m not sure you could have written it as a younger man.
I wasn’t that cynical then. It’s making fun of yourself in a way — like some old Victorian actor in the bowels of the theater taking his makeup off and wondering what it all means.
Do you think your voice has changed along with your perspective?
Of course my voice has changed — through age and, in the ’90s, through abuse. I can’t hit the super-highest notes I could as a young person. But we still sing the old songs in the original keys. Not that I know what those keys are.
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